Please, please, please start a thread on this. This sounds fascinating, and in order to engage with it and explore it I’ll need to know more about this; at the moment I only have suspicions and curiosities.
Granted, English has since embraced civilization with all the fervor you'd expect of a new convert
Do you really think that it belongs to a culture that crossed the line only 1500 years ago?
I'll readily grant that the tendrils of domesticated logic wind their way through the English language deeply. But they similarly wind their way through our own brains deeply.
I’d suggest that they do so in a reinforcing positive feedback loop with our language.
People who study native languages rarely have sudden epiphanies about the relationship of humans to the world, because even though the languages they study open up new horizons for those possibilities, the people studying them bring their domestication to them.
Absolutely. Studying and IMMERSING yourself in another language really mean two different things. Languages don’t die because somebody starts studying another language; they die because the speaker IMMERSES themselves in a different language, rather than learning their ancestral one. I suspect immersion holds the key; lifestyle, not dabbling or making a hobby of it. Trying on a language with full intention. In any case, I recommend this for that special class of people who rewild that can try on new worldviews, and play with letting go of their domestication. I think many of us can do this, if we choose it consciously!
Now I heartily agree that we should study native languages. But whether we use that to replace English, or to understand the language of our land and inform a project of rewilding English, I see as a somewhat more complicated problem.
Yes, I agree with you here. The problem, to me, looks like this: in order to truly learn animist worldviews, we need to immerse ourselves in them. Our very thoughts and logical systems, as English speakers, reinforce domesticating patterns. So we study animist languages, to reseed English (I also HIGHLY recommend ASL for this). But to really learn at the knee of these languages, we have a lifetime of immersion ahead of us; animist languages only open up with greater depths as even a native speaker learns more of them. If we do our jobs right, will we even remember English to come back to it?
This puts the whole idea of cultural appropriation on its head; I don’t want to become a Mohawk, Blackfoot, Navajo, Hopi; but as old-growth cultures, I have a huge amount to learn from them. In learning fully and immersively, what will I call myself when I lie on my deathbed? At that point, will it matter?